Robert James Taylor

Robert Taylor
DPhil Student
New College
robert.taylor@new.ox.ac.uk

Research Topic

A Trip to India: Cultural Indophilia, British Hippiedom, and Post-Imperial Memory

Supervisor: Yasmin Khan

 

  • My research considers the influence of an imagined 'India' on the British cultural output of the mid-late sixties, connecting the fields of 'Modern British' and 'Global and Imperial' history. It investigates British hippies and their romanticised fascination with a reified idea of India, often expressed through artistic means, in order to analyse post-1945 British society's mutable understandings of its recent imperial past.

 

  • I received a Double First Class degree in History after studying as an undergraduate at New College, Oxford, and completed my MPhil in American History at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Before returning to Oxford, I worked in London for various educational and Social Impact-focused organisations, as well as performing music professionally.

 

Awards and Recognition 

  • New College Senior Scholarship (2024-)
  • Winner of the H. W. C. Davis Prize for the highest overall mark in the Preliminary Examinations in History at Oxford, placing 1st in my cohort of more than 250 historians. 
  • New College Academic Scholarship (2017-19) and New College Collection Prizes
  • Awarded historical funding from the Reynolds Bequest to visit the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, Virginia.
  • Achieved a First Class degree in the Oxford History Final Honour School, placing in the top 5% of History students overall. 

 

Publications 

 

Presentations 

  • 'British Hippie Thought and Oral History', New College, 6 May 2025
  • 'A Trip to India', Oxford Modern British History Seminar, 15 May 2025

 

Podcasts

  • 'The Hippie Trail' 2-part episode, Talking with the Hippies, January 2025

 

Previous Research 

  • Undergraduate dissertation - "a Catholicke in his profession, no man more: a reporter of things he saw or knew, no man truer": Robert Dallington's Aphorismes and the English Reception of Guicciardini 
  • MPhil dissertation - Hemispheric Indigenous History in the Early American Republic, 1783-1808
  • Familial research featured in Chowkidar: The Journal of the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia 17/1 (2024), pp. 3-4, 12.

 

Teaching 

  • I have successfully supervised undergraduate dissertations in History and Politics for students at Cambridge, UCL, Edinburgh, Newcastle, and Exeter. Topics include the UDI period of Rhodesian history, Lovers Rock and Reggae, McCarthyism and the New Republic, Neville's The Ladies Parliament, and the First Eastern General Hospital Gazette.